Translated by
Dr. Marilyn Lambert-Drache (Department of
French Studies,
York
University ,
Toronto, Canada)

While suppressing the true world we
have also suppressed the world of appearances (Friedrich Nietzsche).

I. Introduction

What happens to the
world when it is freed from truth and appearances? It becomes the
real universe, the universe of integral reality. Not truth, nor
appearance but integral reality. If the world in the past leaned
toward transcendence, if it fell on occasion into other rear-worlds
(arrières-mondes), today it is falling into reality. From one
transcendence in the heights to another one, this time in the
depths. It is as it were the second fall of man that Heidegger talks about: the fall
into banality – this time though, no redemption is possible.
According to Nietzsche, once the true world and the world of
appearances are lost, the universe becomes a factual, positive
universe, such that it does not even need to be true. This world is
as factual as a ready-made. Duchamp’s “fountain” is the
emblem of our modern hyperreality. It results from the violent
counter-transfer of every poetic illusion into pure reality, the
object transferred onto oneself, every possible metaphor cut short.

The world has become so
real that this reality is only bearable at the expense of perpetual
denial. “This is not a world,” after “this is not a pipe,”
Magritte’s surrealist denial of evidence itself – this double
movement of, on one hand, the absolute and definite evidence of the
world and, on the other hand, the radical denial of this evidence –
dominates the trajectory of modern art, not only of art but also of
all our deeper perceptions, of all our apprehensions of the world.
We are not talking here about philosophical morals, we are not
saying “the world is not what it should be” or “the world is not
what it used to be.” The world is the way it is. Once transcendence
is gone, things are nothing but what they are and, as they are, they are
unbearable. They have lost every illusion and have become
immediately and entirely real, shadowless, without commentary. At
the same time this unsurpassable reality does not exist anymore. It
has no reason to exist for it cannot be exchanged for anything. It
has no exchange value.

II. The Transfer of the World Into
Total Positivity

“Does reality exist?
Are we in a real world?” – here is the leitmotif of our current
culture. This only expresses the fact that the world is prey to
reality and it is only bearable as radical denial. All this is
logical: as the world can no longer be justified in another world,
it needs to be justified here and now and to find strength in
reality while purging itself of any illusion. At the same time, as
the very result of this counter-transfer, the denial of reality as
such grows. For reality is no longer prey to its natural predators,
it proliferates very much like an algae, or like the human species in
general. The real grows like a desert. “Welcome to the desert of the
Real”.2

Illusion, dreams,
passion, madness, drugs but also artifice and simulacrum were the
natural predators of reality. All these have lost their energy as if
they were suffering from some incurable, surreptitious disease (that
might very well be reality itself ). One needs then to find an
artificial equivalent for them. Otherwise, once it has reached a
critical mass, reality will spontaneously destroy itself. It will
implode by itself – which it is already doing now, making room for
the Virtual in all its forms. The Virtual is the ultimate predator,
the plunderer of reality. Reality has generated the Virtual as a
kind of viral and self-destructing agent. Reality has become prey to
virtual reality. The ultimate consequence of a process that started
with the abstraction of objective reality and ends in integral
reality.

The Virtual is not
about a “rear-world” (arrière-monde): The replacement of the
world is total, it repeats itself identically, a perfect lure. So
the question is resolved by the sheer annihilation of symbolic
substance. Even objective reality becomes a useless function, a kind
of trash, the exchange and circulation of which has become more and
more difficult We have moved past objective reality into something
new, a kind of ultra reality that puts an end both to reality and to
illusion. The hypothesis is the following: the world is given to us.
The symbolic law says: what is given must be given back. In the past
one could give thanks, in one way or another, to God or any other
authority, and respond to the gift by sacrifice. From now on there
is no one to give thanks to, for transcendence has vanished. If one
cannot give back anything in exchange for this world, it is
unacceptable. We then need to get rid of the natural world and to
substitute an artificial one for it, built from scratch, a world for
which we do not have to account to anyone. Hence this gigantic
undertaking of technically eliminating the natural world in all its
forms. Anything that is natural will be irrevocably rejected, sooner
or later, as a consequence of this symbolic rule of (impossible)
exchange. It is the final solution (including extermination).

This does not resolve
anything of course. It is impossible to avoid this new debt we have
contracted to ourselves. How can we be absolved from this technical
world and this artificial power? We again need to negate or destroy
this world if we cannot give it back, or exchange it for anything –
and what would we exchange it for? That explains, as our building of
this artificial universe is moving forward, the huge negative
counter-transfer against the integral reality we have created. Deep
denial is now present everywhere. What will prevail over it? This
irresistible undertaking or this violent abreaction?

Let us now enter this
sphere of integral reality (we have yet to determine if this reality
has one, or two, or three dimensions). Here is an example – integral
music. It is heard in quadraphonic spaces and it can be “composed”
on a computer. A music whose sound has been clarified and purged, a
music restored in its technical
perfection. The sound there is not the result of a form; it is
actualized by a programme. A music reduced to a pure wavelength. The
final reception, the sensorial impact on the listener is also
programmed with precision like that in a closed circuit. A virtual
music in other words, flawless, deprived of any imagination,
mistaken for its own model, the enjoyment of which is also virtual.
Is it still music? Nothing is less certain; it has even been
suggested that noise be reintroduced to make it sound more
“musical.”

The same can be said
about synthesized and digital images, images that are pure
creations, with no real reference, and from where the negative
itself has disappeared – we are not only talking about the negative
of the photograph but about the negative moment at the core of the
image, an absence that makes the image vibrate. A digital image is
technically perfect. There is no room there for fuzziness, no
tremor either, or any space left for chance. Is it still an image
then?

Take now the example of
the Integral Man (Homme Intégral), the human being,
genetically modified and edited for perfection. It is purged of any
accident, of any disease, any emotional problem, for genetic
manipulation does not aim at reproducing the original human formula
but a formula that is the most standardized for efficiency (serial
morphing). The movie Minority Report gives us a taste of
this. In this movie crime is prevented and punished before it even
takes place, before anyone knows whether or not the crime would have
taken place. Nipped in the bud, in imagination even, according to
the now universal principle of precaution. The movie is naive and
anachronistic, however, because it still involves repression. In the
future, prevention will be genetic – intragenic. The “criminal gene”
will undergo prophylactic sterilization at birth or even before
birth (this will need to be systematized, of course, because in the
opinion of the police or of the powers that be, we all are potential
criminals).

This manipulation is a
fine illustration of what will happen to the future human being. It
will be modified and corrected. Straightaway, it will be what it
should be ideally; it will never become what it is. It will not even
be alienated anymore, by virtue of its pre-existential modification
for better or for worse. It will not even have to face its otherness
as it will have straightaway been suppressed by its model. All this
relies on a universal process of identification of Evil that, of
course, aims at eradicating. While it used to be metaphysical or
moral, Evil now is materialized, embodied in the genes (it can just
as well be turned into the Axis of Evil).3
It becomes an objective reality, objectively dispensable. We will
manage to eradicate it completely, and with it everything that made
dreams, utopia, illusion, fantasy – all of this, according to the
same global process, is being taken away from the possible, to be
poured back into the real.

The same goes for
everything that has to do with virtual reality and synthesized
models. Digital and programmed, the real does not even have time to
happen. It is sanitized (prophylactisé), pulverized,
short-circuited in its shell like the crime in Minority Report.
Thinking itself is anticipated by models of artificial intelligence.
Time itself, the time already lived out that has no more time to
take place, is captured and spirited away by virtual time, which we
choose, mockingly no doubt, to call “real time.” The historical time
of the event, the psychological time of affect and passion, the
subjective time of judgment and will, all are being questioned
simultaneously. We will not even give time to time.

Last but not least – by
some strange surgical operation, language, in its digital version,
has been purged of its symbolism, of everything that allows language
to be more than what it means. Any absence, any vacuum, any
literalness in it – anything that prevents its meaning from being
brought into focus – has been eliminated like the negative in a
synthesized image. Such is the integral reality of language. It is
also the death of the sign. Integral language does not contain any
signs – the sign and its representation have disappeared. Now it is
precisely when the sign and the real are no longer exchangeable that
reality, now left alone and meaningless, veers off exponentially and
proliferates infinitely. The death of the sign paves the way to
integral reality.

We often hear that the
real has disappeared because of the hegemony of the sign, the images
and the simulacrum, that reality has been erased by the artifice.
This analysis underlies the concept of the Société du Spectacle.
We need to reverse this overly common analysis and say: We have lost
both the sign and the artifice for the benefit of the absolute real.
We have lost everything: the spectacle, alienation, distancing,
transcendence, abstraction – everything that was defending us from
the onset of integral reality, of the immediate realization of a
world with no reprieve. With the disappearance of the simulacrum as
such, a later stage in the process of simulation has been reached,
namely the simulation of a real more real than the real, the
simulation of a hyperreal.

What makes the exchange
impossible if not the abstract transcendence of the value? What
makes the exchange of language possible if not the abstract
transcendence of the sign? All this is now liquidated, pulverized.
The value as well as the sign is affected by the same dizziness of
deregulation. It is not the real but the sign and, with it, all the
universe of meaning and communication, that is subjected to the same
deregulation that affects the markets (maybe this came even before
the deregulation of the world market). The caves of Lascaux
offer an almost trivial example of this confusion.

The original caves
having been closed for a long time, visitors line up in front of a
replica, a simulacrum of the caves, Lascaux II. Most visitors do not
even know that what they are seeing is a replica as there is nowhere
any indication of the existence of the original caves. What awaits
us is a kind of prefiguration of the world: the replica is so
perfect that we will no longer know that it is a replica. Now, what
happens to the original when the replica stops being a replica? Such
is the ironical dialectics of the simulacrum at a later stage of
disappearance. Even the original is equal to the artifice. There is
definitely no more God who can recognize His own (from that point of
view, one may at least say that God is indeed dead). Here we have a
kind of justice, the privileged and the underprivileged ones are now
equal in an artificial world. As soon as the original becomes an
allegory among others in a technically completed world, democracy is
then realized.

As well, what becomes
of the arbitrariness of the sign when the referent stops being the
referent? Without the arbitrariness of the sign, there is no
differential function, no language and no symbolic dimension. As it
stops being sign, the sign becomes a thing among other things. It
becomes something of a total necessity or of an absolute
contingency. Without the instantiation of the meaning by the sign,
only the fanaticism of language remains – this fanaticism that
Ferlusio defines as an “absolutist inflammation of the signifier.”

My hypothesis is that a
kind of radical fetishism, resulting from the eclipse of every
process of meaning, underlies the transformation of the real into
pure information and the cloning of the real by virtual reality.
What hides behind the immateriality of the technologies of the
virtual, of the digital and of the screen, is indeed an injunction,
an imperative that McLuhan had already spotted in the television and
media image: an imperative of reinforced participation, an
interactive investment that may turn into fascination, into the
“ecstatic” implication that we see everywhere in the cyberworld.
Immersion, immanence, and immediacy characterize the virtual. No
more gaze, no more stage, no more imaginary, no more illusion even,
no more exteriority, no more spectacle: the operational fetish has absorbed
all exteriority, all interiority and even time in the operation of
“real time.” It is the realization of utopia. We are this way
getting closer to the real world, a world “integrally” realized,
affected and identified as such. We are talking about the real world
not about the world-as-is, which is totally different The world-as-is
is in the nature of appearances (or even of integral illusion
because there is no possible representation of it) or as Nietzsche
says “while suppressing the true world we have also suppressed the
world of appearances.”

Video, interactive
screens, multimedia, the Internet, virtual reality – we are
threatened on all sides by interactivity. What used to be separated
is now merged; distance is everywhere abolished: between the sexes,
between opposite poles, between stage and audience, between the
protagonists of action, between subject and object, between the real
and it’s double. This confusion of terms, this collision of poles
means that there is no more possibility of a moral judgment, neither
in art nor in morality nor in politics. With the abolition of
distance and of the “pathos” of distance, everything becomes
undecidable, even in the physical realm: when the receiver and the
source of transmission are too close together, a feedback effect
known as the Larsen effect occurs which muddles the transmission
waves; when an event and the broadcasting of that event in real time
are too close together, the event becomes undecidable, virtual,
stripped of its historical dimension and removed from memory. We are
in a kind of generalized Larsen effect. Wherever distance is
abolished, wherever a collision of poles occurs, we get a Larsen
effect.4

Even in reality TV,
where, in the live telling of the story, in the immediate televised
acting, we witness the confusion of the existence and its double. No
more distance, no more vacuum and no more absence: one enters the
screen and the visual image without encountering any obstacle. One
enters one’s life while walking onto a screen. One puts on one’s own
life like a digital suit.

Unlike photography,
cinema, and painting, where there is a scene and a gaze, the video
image and the computer screen induce a kind of immersion, a kind of
umbilical connection and of “tactile” interaction, as McLuhan said
of television. A cellular, corpuscular immersion: one enters the
fluid substance of the image in order to possibly modify it, in the
same way as science infiltrates itself into the genome, the genetic
code, to transform the body itself. One moves as one likes, one makes
of the interactive image what one wishes to. Immersion is the price
to pay for this infinite availability, for this open combinatory of
elements. The same goes for any “virtual” text (the Internet, word
processors): it is worked on like a computer-generated image; it has
nothing to do anymore with the transcendence of the gaze or of
writing. In any case, once in front of the screen, one no longer
sees the text as text, but as image. It is only in the strict
separation of text and screen, of text and image, that writing is an
activity in its own right – never an interaction. As well, only the
strict separation of stage and audience will allow the spectator to
be a participant in one’s own right. Everything today contributes to
abolishing that separation. The spectator is immersed in a
user-friendly, interactive spectacle. Is it the apogee of the
spectacle or is it the end of it? When all become actors, there is
no action, no scene anymore. It is the end of the aesthetic
illusion.

Another form of
implosion is the feedback. Integral reality refers to everything
that works in an integrated circuit. When everything that happens
gets immediate feedback. May 1968 and the radios on the barricades.
One no longer does anything unless one sees oneself do it. Even
irony is part of the mechanism. Immediate promiscuity of the control
screen, even in our head. Once again it is not a
representation but a rotating movement of things that are jumbled
together, joined, saturated. It is a perfect reality, in the sense
that it is realized right through (perfectum). In a perfect reality
nothing is “verified” unless it is “pasted” on and mistaken for its
own image. Feedback best illustrates this process. It affects the
visual and mediatic universe as well as the political and
intellectual life, the daily and individual life, our movements, our
thinking. This automatic refraction of our
thoughts affects us deeply in our own perception of the simplest and
most natural world. Feedback seals everything by focusing on it, by
automatically simulating it. In a way, feedback is the virus of our
postmodernity.

Feedback short-circuits
the gaze; it short-circuits the representation by, so to speak,
duplicating things beforehand and by interfering with their
progress. Feedback covers everything with a “performance veil” – a
particularly sensitive phenomenon in the photographic universe where
beings and things immediately “put on” a context, a culture, a
meaning, an idea of themselves while blocking off every vision and
creating a sort of blindness that Raphaël Sanchez Ferlosio
denounces: There is a terrible form of blindness that very few
notice. It allows you to look at and to see but not to see at once
without looking at. It is the way things used to be: one would not
look at them, one would just see them. Today everything is caught in
duplicity; there is no pure and direct impulse. This is how the
countryside has become “landscape,” that is to say a representation
of itself… .

In this way one may say
that our perception itself, our immediate sensitivity have become
aesthetic. All our senses – sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste –
have become aesthetic in the worse meaning of the word. Therefore
any new vision can only result from a deconstruction of this
feedback, from a resolution of this counter-transfer that blocks off
any vision. One needs to distinguish the process of confusion with
one’s own image from the process of representation where we differ from
each other by our opposite image and enter an open form of
alienation, an open form of play with the image. It is precisely the
mirror, the image, the gaze and the scene that were opening onto a
culture of the metaphor.

Machines produce only
machines. This is increasingly true as the virtual technologies are
becoming more perfect. At a certain level of machine-ness, of
immersion in virtual machinery, there is no more distinction between
man and machine. The machine is on both sides of the interface. You
may indeed be merely the space of the machine now: man has become
the virtual reality of the machine, its mirror operator. This has to
do with the very essence of the screen. One cannot look “through”
the screen as if it were a looking-glass. The dimensions of time
itself merge there in “real time.” The characteristic of any virtual
surface is first of all to be there, empty and thus likely to be
filled with anything. It is left to you to interact in real time
with the vacuum.

Machines produce only
machines. The texts, images, films, speeches, and programmes that
come out of computers are machine products. They have the features
of machine products: they are artificially expanded, face lifted by
the machine; the movies are full of special effects, the texts full
of lengthy passages and repetitions, which are the consequences of
the malicious will of the machine to function at all costs (for that
is its passion), and of the operator’s fascination with the
limitless opportunity of operating the machine. Hence the wearisome
character of all this violence and “pornographied” sexuality, which
are merely special effects of violence and sex
that are no longer even fantasized by humans. This pure mechanic
violence does not affect us any longer. Hence all these texts which
can be regarded as the works of “intelligent” virtual agents, whose
only act is the act of programming. The rest unfolds in a purely
automatic fashion. This has nothing to do with automatic writing (écriture
automatique), which played on the magical telescoping of words
and concepts, whereas all we are left with here is the automatic
programming of all the possibilities. Forward, the machine design of
the body, the make-up of the text and the image. This is called
cybernetics: controlling the image, the text, the body from within,
as it were, by playing with its genetic
code or modalities. It is this phantasm of the ideal performance of
the text or image, the possibility of correcting endlessly, which
triggers in the operator this dizziness of interactivity with
his/her own object and, at the same time, the anxious dizziness of
not having reached the technological limits of his/her
possibilities. In fact, the virtual machine is speaking you, it is
thinking you.

Is there, by the way,
any possibility of discovering something in cyberspace? The Internet
merely simulates a mental space of freedom and discovery. Indeed it
merely offers an enhanced, yet conventional, space, in which the
operator interacts with known elements, pre-existent sites and
established codes. Nothing exists beyond these search parameters.
Every question has its anticipated response. You are the automatic
questioning-and-answering device of the machine. Both coder and
decoder, you are, in fact, your own terminal. That is the ecstasy of
communication.

No more “other” facing
you. No more final destination. Any destination, any correspondent
will do. The system goes on, without end and without purpose with
the sole potential for infinite reproduction and involution. Hence
the comfortable dizziness produced by this electronic interaction
that acts like drugs. One can spend one’s entire life at this,
without any interruption. Drugs themselves are only the perfect
example of a crazed, closed-circuit interactivity.

In order to win you over to it,
people tell you that the computer is merely a handier and more
complex kind of typewriter. But this is not true. The typewriter is
an entirely external object. The page flutters in the open air, and
so do I. I have a physical relation to writing. I touch the blank or
written page with my eyes, which is something I cannot do with the
screen. As for the computer, it is a true prosthesis. I am in a
tactile and intersensory relation with it. I am becoming myself an
ectoplasm of the screen. Hence, in this incubation of the virtual
image and of the brain, the technical faults which afflict computers
and which are like the lapsus of one’s own body.

On the other hand, the
fact that priority is given to the identity of the network and never
to the individuals’ identity implies the option of hiding and
disappearing into the intangible space of the virtual and thus, the
option of not being located anywhere, which resolves all problems of
identity, not to mention those of otherness. The attraction of all
these virtual machines undoubtedly derives not so much from the
thirst for information and knowledge as from the possibility to
dissolve oneself into a phantom conviviality. A feeling of “being high” takes the place of happiness.
Virtuality comes close to happiness only because it surreptitiously
removes every reference from it. It gives you everything, but, at
the same time, it subtly takes everything away from you. The subject
is realized to perfection, but then, it automatically becomes object
and panic sets in.

It is against this
world that has become entirely operational that the denial and
disavowal of reality develop. If the world is to be taken as a
whole, it must be rejected as a whole, the way the body rejects a
foreign element. There is no other solution. Thanks to a form of
instinct, of vital reaction we are able to rise up against this
immersion in a perfected world, in the “Kingdom of
Heaven”
where real life is sacrificed to the hyper realization of all these
possibilities, to its maximal performance, the same way the human
species is sacrificed to its genetic perfection. Our
negative abreaction results from our hypersensitivity to the ideal
life conditions that are offered to us. This perfect reality, to
which we are sacrificing every illusion, is, of course, a phantom
reality. It belongs to another world. If both reality and truth were
subjected to a lie detector, they would confess that they do not
believe in this perfect reality. Reality has vanished, and yet we
are suffering as if it still existed. We are like Ahab in
Moby-Dick: “If I feel the pain in my leg, although
it no longer exists, who can assure me that you will not suffer from
the torments of hell even after your death?”

There is nothing
metaphorical in this sacrifice. It is more of a surgical operation,
which provides oneself some kind of self-enjoyment: As Benjamin
said: “Humanity that, long ago, with Homer, was an object of
contemplation for the Olympian gods, has now become its own object
of contemplation. Its alienation from oneself is such that it is now
experiencing its own destruction as a first-rate aesthetic
sensation.” Self-destruction is indeed one of all the options
offered to us. It is an exceptional option for it poses a challenge
to all the other ones. Focusing on a perfectly integrated reality is
bound to entail many forms of exclusion, of eccentric or parallel
worlds – not only marginal or peripheral ones as they exist in
traditional societies, but worlds that find themselves clearly
dissociated at the very core of this total integration. The
homogeneity and the very coherence of life are, for that matter,
turning us off. What applies to the real applies to the social: one
day everything will be social, everything will be real but we will
not be there anymore. We will be elsewhere. Everything will be
social and dissociated. Double lives, parallel worlds will be our
both negative and happy fate. We will be freed from the grip of the
real. Are all the functions – the body, the real, sex, death – not
destined to live on as parallel worlds, as autonomous peculiarities,
completely dissociated from the dominant world?

Finally, what is
fundamental is the strangeness of the world, the one which resists
the status of objective reality. The world itself resists
globalization. As well, what is fundamental is our own
“stranger-ness” (étrangeté), the one which resists the status
of subject. Double illusion: the illusion of an objective reality of
the world and the illusion of a subjective reality of a subject.
They are reflected in the same mirror and are one and the same
founding movement of our metaphysics.

As for the
world-as-is, it is not at all objective. It rather looks like a
strange attractor. Since the world and the appearances are
dangerously attractive, we prefer to exchange it for its operational
simulacrum, its artificial truth and its automatic writing. This is
yet a bit risky because everything with which we defend ourselves
against vital illusion – this entire strategy of
defence
by the principle of reality – acts as a true emotional shield and
becomes unbearable to us. In all those forms of disavowal,
denial, denegation (in the sense of the German Verleugnung, not Verneinung), we
are no longer confronted with a dialectics of negativity or with the
work of the negative. This move no longer concerns notions of
ultimate purpose, or of contradiction, as in simple negative
critique; it has to do with reality as such, its principle and its
hard evidentiality. The larger the space taken by positivity, the
more likely it is that denial – possibly even silent – will turn
violent. We are all dissenters of reality today, clandestine
dissenters most of the time. When there is no possibility of
exchange between thought and reality, immediate denial becomes the
only way to think reality.

Negativity used to
correspond to plain positivity, or critical reality, that had not
yet crossed over to the other side of the mirror. When positivity
turns out to be absolute, denial becomes radical. Every option of
dialectical negativity has been absorbed and liquidated. The
limiting case of that ultimate reaction to the fundamentalism of
reality is absolute denial (i.e. negationism, as we speak of
“denying” the Holocaust). Think about it: it is the virtual itself
that is negationist. It is the virtual that takes away the substance
of the real, setting it off balance. We are living in a society of
negationism by virtue of its virtuality. Disbelief reigns everywhere. No event is
perceived as “real” anymore. Criminal attempts, trials, wars,
corruption, opinion polls: all of that is either falsified or
undecidable. State power and its institutions are the first victims
of the disgrace of the principle of reality. Hence the moral
urgency, in the face of rampant negationism, of recovering the
“citizen’s viewpoint,” taking one’s stand for reality, against the
frailty of all information. The mirror of information has been
broken. The mirror of historical time has been broken. This is why
it has become possible to negate the existence of the Shoah,
together with the rest (the Pentagon crash, man landing on the
moon). The reign of the virtual is also the reign of the principle
of uncertainty. It is the inevitable counterpart of a reality turned
unreal by excess of positivity.

Will this last forever?
Are we doomed to remain captives of this transfer of the real into
total positivity, and of its no less ponderous counter-transfer
shift toward pure and simple negativity? Against total absorption,
against extinction of the sign and its representation, we have said
it was imperative to save difference, all differences. In
particular, to save the distinction between the world-as-is and the
real world. Whereas everything pushes us toward the virtual
realization of the world, we need instead to wrench the real out of
its reality principle. In fact, it is this very confusion that
prevents us from seeing the world-as-is. In the words of Italo Svevo:
“the search for causes is an immense misunderstanding, a clinging
superstition, preventing things and events from coming into being as
they are”. Namely: in their singularity. The
real world belongs to the order of generality, the world-as-is to
singularity. To repeat: not only is it a world of difference, it is
one of absolute, radical difference, more different than difference,
at the remotest distance from that sort of fusion /confusion.

III. I dream of an image…

Consider the
literalness of the image. The image is not related to the truth. It
is related to appearances. Hence its magical affiliation with the
illusion of the world-as-is – an affiliation which reminds us that,
whatever its content, the real (like the worst) is never a certainty
and that, perhaps the world may do without the real and the
principle of reality. I believe that images affect us immediately,
well ahead of, at an infra-level to representation, at the level of
intuition, of perception. In that sense, an image is always
absolutely surprising. Or at least it should be so. Sadly, because
of that, we can say that images are scarce. The force of images,
most of the time, is cut off, deflected, intercepted by everything
we want them to say for us.

So you can see there is
a blur in the real. Reality is not focused. The world-as-is cannot
be brought into focus (which makes it very different from the real
world). Bringing the world into focus would refer to objective
reality, so-called reality on the side of the objects, that is to
say bringing it into focus on models of representation – as it
happens when we bring the lens of the camera into focus on the
object, aiming for absolute precision of the image. Fortunately,
this definitive level of precision is never achieved. Full control
through verification and identification of the world cannot be
achieved. The lens displaces the object. Or the other way around. In
any case, there is displacement.

There is an aphorism by
Lichtenberg that speaks of “tremor.” Indeed, all gestures, including
the most assured, begin with a tremor, like a fuzziness of motion.
And there is always a trace of it left behind. Without that tremor,
that fuzziness, when a gesture is purely procedural, when it is
brought into perfect focus, we have something of the order of
madness. So, genuine images are those which attest that tremor of
the world, whatever the situation or the object: pictures of war,
still-life compositions, landscape, portrait, art, and documentary.
At this point, the image is something that belongs to the world, it
is a part of its becoming, it participates in the metamorphosis of
appearances. The image is a fragment of the hologram of the world.
Every detail of it is a refraction of the whole. A nice metaphor for
this is found in the movie entitled The Student of Prague.
After selling his image to the Devil, he breaks up the mirror of
representation (that is his lost image). Only then does he find his
genuine image, in the shards of the mirror – and he dies.

The purpose of a
photograph is not to document the event. It aspires to be the event
itself. Logic will claim that, first, there is the event, first
comes the real, then only will the image appear, to document it.
Sadly, this is what happens most of the time. A more poetic sequence
intends that the event has never taken place in an absolute sense,
that it remains in some way a stranger to itself. Something of this
strangerness survives in every event, in every object, probably in
every individual. This is what the image must account for, or
“develop” so to speak, and for this to be developed, the image
itself must remain, in some way, a stranger to itself. It ought not
to reflect itself as medium; it must not take itself for an image.
It ought to remain a fiction, an echo of the irresolvable fiction of
the event. The image must not be caught in its own trap; nor should
it let itself be trapped by the feedback loop. The worst part for us
today is the impossibility of seeing a world without feedback – so
as not to have it recaptured, raptured, filmed, photographed, before
we can even see it. That is lethal not only for the “real” world,
but for the image itself, since, if everything is an image, the
image is nowhere, at least as an exception, an illusion, a parallel
universe. In the visual flow of events in which we find ourselves
submerged, the image itself does not even have the time to become an
image.

Can photography be an
exception in the face of that outpouring of images, can it restore
them to their initial power? To do so, the clatter of the world must
be suspended; the object must be grasped at the only moment of true
magic, the first contact, when things have not yet sensed our
presence, when absence and vacuum have not yet evaporated …. In
fact, it is necessary for the world itself to act out the role of
the photographer – as if it had the possibility to appear to us
outside ourselves.

I dream of an image
that would be the automatic writing of the singularity of the world
– after the Iconoclastic dream of Byzantium. The Iconoclasts held
that the only genuine images were those in which the divine figure
was immediately present – as in the veil of the Holy Face – an
automatic writing of the singularity of the divinity, of the face of
Christ, without any interference from the human hand. I have a dream
of an immediate calque, like the reverse image of the negative in
photography. The Iconoclasts rejected violently all other images,
human-made icons that, according to them, were mere simulacra of the
divine, acheiropoiesis.5
Similarly, we, modern iconoclasts, might reject all those images
that are mere simulacra resembling the real, or an idea, an
ideology, whichever truth. Most images are of that type, but virtual
images even more so. They resemble nothing. This is exactly it. What
is cheiropoietic? What is acheiropoietic? Isn’t the act of
photography in this sense properly acheiropoietic? Automatic writing
by virtue of light, without interference from the real or the idea
of the real? Such automaticity would make photography the prototype
of the literalness of a world from which the human hand has
disappeared. The world as self-generator, radical illusion, pure
trace, with no simulation, no human interference, above all without
truth. If there is a product par excellence of the human mind, a
cheiropoietic product, it has got to be the truth, objective
reality.

Have we not had, ever
since the beginning, the profound fantasy of a world functioning
without us? The poetic temptation to see the world in our absence,
exempt of all human intervention, the all too human willpower? What
is so immensely pleasurable in poetic language, in le mot
d’esprit, is to see language operate by itself, in its
materiality, its literalness, without being mindful of meaning. This
is what fascinates us so much. The same thing goes for anagrams,
anamorphosis, the “figure hidden in the carpet.” Does not
photography also operate as a means of revelation in both senses of
the word in French – it develops, technically; and it reveals,
metaphysically – “the figure in the carpet”? Italo Calvino wrote:
“The lesson of a myth is in the literalness of its narrative. Every
interpretation impoverishes the myth and strangles it. Better to
meditate on each detail patiently, never abandoning its figurative
language.”

Even dreams, in their
psychoanalytic versions, lose their literal character. They fall
prey to meaning and interpretation. Dreams, however, like myths, are
cunning. They contest, like language in general, what we want them
to signify. There is a cunning of literalness that goes against
analytic exegesis and that resuscitates ever so subtly (is this not
the secret of literacy?) the world-as-is, a world which is,
literally speaking, only what it is.

These are the stakes
nowadays. We are being faced with a new fundamentalism, a genuine
fanaticism that, with the help of all the data provided by all the
technologies, is taking us further and further from the literal and
material world, further and further from a truly literal world, off
toward a world technically “real.”

Jean
Baudrillard is among the most important theorists of our
time. He has been employing theory to challenge the real for many
years. His recent books include
The Vital Illusion, The
Spirit of Terrorism, Requiem For The Twin Towers, Cool
Memories IV, and Passwords.
He is an editor of the
International Journal of Baudrillard Studies.

Marilyn Lambert-Drache is Associate Professor of Linguistics
and Associate Dean of Arts at York University. She has written
extensively on language planning issues in French-speaking
countries. She is the author of
Sur le bout de la langue, Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press,
1997.

Endnotes

1
This is the text of a paper given at the Light Onwords /
Light Onwards: Living Literacies Conference at York
University, Toronto, Canada (November 14-18, 2002). For more
information about this conference and transcripts of papers see:http://www.nald.ca/fulltext/ltonword/cover.htm

2
The words spoken by resistance leader Morpheus to Neo in the
Wachowski brother’s movie, the Matrix.

3
See also Jean Baudrillard.
L’intelligence du Mal.
In International Journal of Baudrillard Studies. Volume
2, Number 2, July 2005.
see: http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol2_2/mal.htm

4
The Larsen effect is commonly experienced as electro acoustic
feedback between a microphone and amplifier.